Hannes Alfven Quotes

Science is something that you have facts. They can be tested. They can be checked. Heterosexual AIDS, another one.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Experience by itself is not science.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

When the scientific method came into being, it gave us a new window on the truth; namely, a method by laboratory-controlled experiments to winnow true hypotheses from false ones.

As a scientist, you're not supposed to make decisions without the data.

I'm a firm believer in science.

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results.

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it.

The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition.

It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Practical sciences proceed by building up; theoretical science by resolving into components.

Science is a collection of successful recipes.

Scientists actively approach the door to knowledge—the boundary of the domain of what we know. We question and explore and we change our views when facts and logic force us to do so. We are confident only in what we can verify through experiments or in what we can deduce from experimentally confirmed hypotheses.

Science is a combination of theory and experiment and the two together are how you make progress.

Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong.